Palworld is a thing that happened, I guess

I don’t want to start on a down note, here. I’ve dropped a hundred hours into Palworld, and I bet I have twenty or thirty more before I finish the main quest line. Pokemon Legends: Arceus is my favorite Pokemon game. I love survival games like Valheim and V Rising. I love seeing what what the little people get up to in the Sims.

The only way this game could be more what I like is if it had extremely serious disgraced nobles on the run from a corrupt church. You know, like Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc etc etc.

But turn-based battles is something Palworld doesn’t do, and this is really the key difference between it and Pokemon.

The Plot

As in many RPGs, in Palworld, you arrive, shipwrecked, on the shores of a mysterious land. The Palapagos Islands were named by the first adventurer that washed ashore, astounded by these strange creatures that they named Pals, as they became friendly and helpful once caught in a Palsphere. Ancient carvings taught them the way to craft Pal spheres from wood, stone, and glowing crystals they called, unorginally, Paldium.

The stories of this first survivor and those of the five tower bosses are told environmentally, by glowing slates left in interesting places. These bosses are part of the five factions vying for control of the islands — one group wants to sell Pals, another wants to save them (but needs to earn money by… selling pals), one wants to cook them, one wants to experiment on them, and one wants to use them to take Total Control of the islands.

The Pals are the victims here, and by your actions, you’ll either be their savior or just another oppressor. The Pals are not shy about telling you how they feel about you, either. Work them too hard, and they’ll develop eating disorders, get depressed and sulk in bed all day, become injured, slack off, or trying to contact the Free Pal alliance to come save them from their slavery.

But that’s okay. If things get really bad, you can wipe their memory clean with mind control drugs and then they will be happy and work very hard and never complain even though some essential part of them have died.

Better than Pokemon?

That’s some of the stuff that has always bugged me about Pokemon. Little kids catch wild critters and then force them to fight and evolve and fight some more? And if they don’t fight well — who knows what happens to them? Also, in Palworld they make it clear that elsewhere are the normal animals we see in the real world. Pals are the genetic leavings of an ancient civilization. The only reason they survive to this day is that they were isolated for so long by a mysterious barrier of mist (and perhaps not quite in the same reality). But the factions fighting over them will almost certainly make them extinct before long. Unless they get that forced breeding system going.

Pokemon doesn’t answer these questions; it doesn’t even ask them. Sure, I’ve been told I overthink this too much, but the Palworld devs asked those questions, so maybe — not so crazy?

It’s hard to write about this game

Most every mobile gacha game claims to be so addictive that you’ll give up breathing before you stop dropping money to open imaginary treasure chests, but they don’t have anything on this game. Every time I sit down to write about this game, I think about another screen shot I could take, and then I’m playing it again. I’ve started this post a dozen times.

So let’s break it down.

Base building

At its core, Palworld is a survival game. You’ll freeze to death your first night if you don’t make a fire and some basic shelter, make some basic clothing — just like every other survival game. From there, you can gather more and more resources and make the base of your dreams. Up to three of them. In my current game, I have one that produces the food and makes the things. I also have a mining base and a hidden, secret base where I breed the Pals.

Base building is a little more fiddly than it is in Valheim. Things don’t always click together correctly; I imagine they will improve on this. Still, it’s simple enough to toss together something that will keep you safe while you gather resources to build some defenses.

Palworld doesn’t currently have PvP, but as in Valheim, you’ll be invaded from time to time by one of the factions or just random mobs (my favorite: Flying Sky Hyenas). Any Pals in the base will lay down their lives in defense, but you can eventually be proactive and put up defensive walls (of wood, stone or metal), gun emplacements and other exciting things to keep your pals safe.

Manufacturing

Before long, you’ll have access to work benches, furnaces, and assembly lines on which you’ll cook your food, grind your wheat, construct your armor and weapons, Pal spheres, refine ores, and so on. You can work some of these things by yourself, but you’ll want Pals to help. Each Pal has at least one thing they can do; plant seeds, water gardens/run mills, keep refrigerators and coolers cold, cook/run furnaces/light fires, generate electricity, and on and on. Each Pal may have special abilities that improve how it works.

Each time you ask a Pal to do something, its sanity will drop. The longer it is working, the more likely it is that the Pal will become depressed and refuse to work. Having to fight off base invasions does the same thing. Not having you around will do it. Not having the right food (or no food!) will do it. Some Pals are more resilient than others, but eventually they’ll reach their wit’s end. They have a medicine workbench for that. And Pals with the medicine skill to work them.

Finding the right team for your base(s) is as important as finding the right team for battling. It’s easy to lose an hour or two just keeping the bases running smoothly.

Resource gathering

As with everything else, Pals will gather resources, if they are within the base. They’ll cut down trees, stack the wood, mine the stone and ore, and harvest the crops without you asking them to do it. One of the first things any player does is set up an automated berry farm to make sure all the Pals have at least something to eat, even if it a berry that doesn’t really help the dark thoughts go away.

The Pals

I mean, they’re Pokemon. Aside from the battles being real time, the Pal part of the game is extremely familiar. You can choose three abilities among all they can learn to be the abilities they use in a fight, allowing you to have a Pal be appropriate for more than its base type. Each Pal has one or two elements that provide their strengths and weaknesses; each Pal has some hidden stats, each Pal has its natures.

Pals roam the overworld just as in the more recent Pokemon games, and most of the times you can choose whether or not to engage them. You will get their drops whether you kill them or catch them, so there’s no reason not to try and catch every Pal you come across. For a better reason, it’s great experience.

Pals can be bred. Any two Pals can breed if they are of opposite gender; if they are different species, their child will be something different from both of them. The child will possibly inherit some of the natures of their parents. Breeding Pals for their natures is incredibly key; I’ve bred the fastest ground mount in the game with two speed natures and a decent fighting nature as well.

Unlike Pokemon, Pals don’t evolve. They can be condensed — take a Pal and some number of other Pals of the same species, put them in a condenser, and the first Pal levels up while the other bravely give their lives for the cause. This takes exponentially more Pals each level — first 4, then 16 and so on.

Combat

The wide variety of Pal skills and natures makes for endless options on how to build your party. You can choose a variety of Pals to be formidable against whatever they might come across, or you can use your entire party to supercharge one Pal (or you yourself), or any combination. Since every Pal, even of the same species, is very different from the others, there are going to be some synergistic combinations that just make your damage insane — and any number of combinations that can make your Pals unable to succeed in the simplest fights.

There’s several kinds of boss battles: The “Lucky” Pals glow and are larger and have more health than regular Pals. You’ll want to capture these in order to get the “Lucky” nature that you can breed into other Pals. There are also the open world bosses, that give valuable Ancient Technology points the first time you kill them. Then there’s the sealed realms, which are single room dungeons containing just a boss. Again, Ancient Technology points for the first kill. Abandoned mineshafts also hold bosses. The five towers each contain a human and giant Pal pair that defends their ideology. And there are legendary Pals lurking around the islands.

Each of these will require tuning your team, hitting type advantages, figuring out defenses, making helpful food and so on. It’s pretty fun.

The Endgame?

I’m currently level 42 or 43, of 50. I’ve defeated all the open world, non-legendary bosses except for Anubis (47). I’ve defeated all the sealed realms, and fought in one of the three wildlife sanctuaries (which is illegal). I’ve peeked into the other two and caught a few Pals, but with the PIDF (Palagapos Islands Defense Force) lurking around, as well as all the Pals there being super strong and quite social, I haven’t spent a lot of time there.

I’ve defeated two towers. I can clear the first one without helping my Pal. I still need to lend a hand to my Pals for the second tower. The third tower kills me pretty quick, but I’ll probably start working on it more seriously in a couple more levels when I can make assault rifle ammo. (I have the assault rifle of rare quality from a dropped pattern, but I only have the ammo I’ve been looting from Syndicate faction members).

But eventually I’ll hit 50, catch the legendaries, finish the towers, and then I’ll be done. I’m looking forward to not having an addictive game swallowing up all my free time 🙂

Until then, I’m having fun with it.